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News Updates	Fri., February 13, 2004 Shvat 21, 5764	Israel Time: 03:59 (GMT+2)

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Unveiled criticism

By Ori Nir

WASHINGTON - The most strongly reverberating voice in North America today calling for reform in Islam is that of a 35-year-old feminist journalist of Pakistani background. Although she has little formal background in Islam, Irshad Manji is brimming with directness and audacity and is asking sharply incisive questions about the religious culture that has been troubling America so much since September 11, 2001.

Manji's new book, "The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith" (that is the book's title in the United States; its title in Canada is "The Trouble with Islam: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change") has already begun to make waves. As she goes about from place to place as part of the marketing campaign for her book in the U.S., she is accompanied by a bodyguard due to threats that have been made on her life. Says Manji: "This book is controversial, and there are many who would not like to see it published, I know. But I am not deterred."

She wears her hair short with a spiky look. Her polemical style of speech is just as spiky: "I get excited and sometimes enraged. I won't deny that. But I am angry because I care, and because I have so much faith in my faith that I would like to believe that Muslims are capable of thinking, more than we give credit to ourselves."

The book is written as an open letter "to my fellow Muslims," although it does, to a certain extent, address the general public as well. When it was published in Canada a few months ago, it became an overnight best-seller, but not because the members of the Muslim minority in Canada flocked to the bookstores. Quite the contrary - the leaders of that community boycotted Manji, who, in their opinion, was legitimizing the enemies of Muslims and Islam in America. It is not every day that a young lesbian Muslim expresses criticism of the beliefs, customs and traditions of her religion and utters what many people in the West think, but will not say aloud out of political correctness.

Hurling a gauntlet

Manji does not deny that she wants to stir up a storm: "Anyone who engages in effective social change knows that half the battle is getting people to give a damn. Well, people now give a damn."

She utters this with all the force of hurling a gauntlet to the floor. Her English is very precise, very incisive. Her sound bites are similar to those of an actress appearing on a theater stage and, in general, her tone of speech is very severe. In contrast, her book is written in an entirely different tone - in an informal style suffused with humor.

Her own story begins in a madressa (a religious Muslim school) in a small town near Vancouver. She grew up in an immigrant family, the child of Pakistani-born Muslims who had settled in Uganda, where they led an affluent life until they fled to Canada in the early 1970s, following the military revolt led by Idi Amin. In Canada, she was sent to a public school. On Sundays, she attended a madressa.

"I entered its premises wearing a white polyester chador [head-covering or shawl] and departed several hours later with my hair flattened and my spirit deflated, as if the condom over my head had properly inoculated me from `unsafe' intellectual activity," she writes in her book.

She soon snapped back and began to torment her teacher with questions: Why are women not permitted to lead prayers in the mosque? Why did Mohammed kill an entire Jewish tribe in the Arabian Peninsula, although the Koran commanded him to be a man of peace? And why are Muslim children taught to stay away from Jews in order to prevent their souls from being contaminated by these infidels?

After three years of such frustrating, difficult questions, she was expelled from the madressa, whereupon she began to learn about Islam on her own.

"The Trouble with Islam" depicts the intellectual and spiritual journey of an inquisitive, rebellious young woman who is determined to find out why Muslim culture is so contaminated by prejudiced thinking, stereotypes and conspiracy theories, why it is so closed and xenophobic, why it refuses to change and adapt to the West's liberal system of values, and why it exhibits so little self-criticism.

The book offers no profound answers to these questions. Generally speaking, "The Trouble with Islam" does not probe very deeply. Manji has not produced here an in-depth research study, neither in the field of religious studies nor in cultural studies. She does not tell her readers about reformist initiatives in Muslim societies in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, America or Europe. In her view, that is not the book's agenda. Instead, its goal is to challenge its readers to think and, especially, to offer its Muslim readers a mirror.

In order to write such a book, she observes, you do not have to be an authority on Muslim religious law or a professor of Islamic studies: "The moral authority of someone who has lived the Muslim cultural experience is good enough to ask questions and to let my readers stew in these questions."

As an adolescent and a young woman, Manji was considerably frustrated and disappointed by Islam. She engaged in much soul-searching and experienced much anger; however, three years ago, she decided to conduct an incisive clarification of the question of "whether there is something cardinal, something inextricably core, within Islam that makes it more rigid today than its spiritual siblings, Christianity and Judaism."

Opening the gates

Manji did not make her decision to delve into this question in the wake of 9/11, when many Muslims were driven to do considerable soul-searching: She made her decision a year earlier. At the time, she was hosting a television program that focused on the lives of homosexuals and lesbians. Her editor, Moses Znaimer, a Canadian Jew, sent her a report from one of the news agencies about a 17-year-old Nigerian woman who had been sentenced by a Muslim religious court to 180 lashes for having engaged in extramarital sexual relations, although she had produced no fewer than seven witnesses who testified that she had been raped by three men. The court decided to be merciful in her case and ruled that the sentence would be carried out 40 days after the delivery of her child. Znaimer, in a marginal note to this report, wrote Manji: "One of these days you'll tell me how you reconcile this kind of insanity and female mutilation with your Muslim faith."

This challenge drove her to resume her reading and research, she writes in her book. She read the Koran and arrived at the conclusion that this sacred Muslim text was so vague and ambiguous that it could provide her with no answers. No could she find any in the hadith, the traditions attributed to the prophet Mohammed. Only after a year of soul-searching did she discover what every first-year student in an introductory course on Islam knows. It was only then that she learned of a critical development in the history of Islam: "the closing of the gates of ijtihad."

Ijtihad is the intellectual engagement in interpretation of Muslim sources - namely, the Koran and the hadith - through independent, creative thinking, which is an approach similar to the one used by the classic rabbinical authorities of the Talmud. This intellectual activity continued in Sunni Islam until the 10th century. It was then brought to a halt, principally because the teachers of Muslim religious law feared the prospect of "inflationary" religious commentary disseminated by unauthorized interpreters.

During this period, the religious leadership of Muslim orthodoxy arrived at the unanimous decision that free interpretation of Muslim sources must be stopped. This development is known as the "closing of the gates of ijtihad." Many scholars believe that this point in the history of Islam caused the religion to become very conservative from the intellectual standpoint and to turn into a rigid, fossilized faith.

This is also Manji's chief argument. Like other reformers in Islam's history - none of whom proved very successful - she is calling for a reopening of the gates of ijtihad. However, unlike her predecessors, Manji is a woman who is also the classic, liberal product of Western society. She therefore proposes that Muslim women become the driving force for reform in Islam. She also maintains that Muslim society in Western countries can play a leading role in the promotion of this reform.

Partners abroad

Manji proposes that the reform begin with what she calls "Operation Ijtihad." This operation, she writes, will not kick off with any change in the doctrine set out by Muslim religious rulings. Instead, it will be launched through the promotion of business initiatives among women in the Muslim world. The U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia will grant loans on easy terms to women in the Muslim world to enable them to open small businesses and to enjoy economic independence. Independent women would be liberated women who would have the motivation to demand an open-minded Muslim society.

An additional aspect of the so-called Operation Ijtihad would be the liberation of the media in the Muslim world from its one-sided approach, writes Manji. The media of Muslim society could play a leading role in the elimination of both prejudice against and hatred toward Jews and Israel, she adds.

Manji, incidentally, has visited Israel twice, once as the guest of the Canada- Israel Committee, a pro-Israel lobby group. She describes with great admiration Israel's democratic, vibrant society and places considerable emphasis on the power of Israeli society's pluralistic nature and on the vitality shown in its ability to deal with self-criticism. Meanwhile, she downplays Israeli society's weak points. "In future editions of the book," she promises, "Israel will be less romanticized."

Beyond the economic empowerment of Muslim women and the professional upgrading of the media in the Muslim world - two of the principal features in the American administration's plan for promoting democratization in the Muslim world - Manji offers no clearly defined program for encouraging reformist initiatives in Islam. When asked about that subject, she responds that she has to save something for the coming editions of her book and perhaps for additional books in the future.

Manji's book has already been published in Canada, the U.S. and Germany and will, in the near future, be published in a number of European countries. For the moment, there are no plans for translating it into Hebrew. She has decided that she will not sign any contract in Israel before signing a contract for translating her book into Arabic. Since she does not anticipate anyone in the Arab world daring to publish "The Trouble with Islam" legally, one should not expect a Hebrew edition in the foreseeable future. Those who might not have the opportunity of reading the book might, however, be able to see it in a film version: Manji is already working on a documentary based on her book.

Irshad Manji: "There are many who would not like to see this book published. I know. But I am not deterred."